Four Questions on How the High Level Political Forum 2019 Can Improve SDG Implementation

Growing Pains at the International Criminal Court

Twenty Years After Resolution on Protection of Civilians, United Nations Security Council Still Lacks Political Will

Twenty years on from the first UN Security Council (UNSC) thematic resolution addressing protection of civilians in armed conflict (PoC), it would be difficult to argue that civilians are better protected today than they were then, writes SARAH ADAMCZYK.
Civilians account for the vast majority of conflict casualties, both as collateral and as direct targets of conflict violence, she writes in a policy brief titled ‘Twenty years of protection of civilians at the UN Security Council’, published by the Overseas Development Institute’s Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG).
In 1999, the UNSC introduced protection of civilians in armed conflict as a thematic agenda item through Resolution 1265 and, pursuant to Chapter VII of the UN Charter, for the first time authorized the use of force by UN peacekeepers “to afford protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence”.
Since then, UNSC policy and practice on PoC has significantly expanded, including in the mandates of UN peacekeeping operations – of the 14 current UN peacekeeping missions, eight operate under an express PoC mandate – as well as through thematic and country-specific resolutions.
These developments in the normative framework, however, have yet to fully translate into systematic and consistent protection of civilians on the ground. “On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Resolution 1265, it is important to both reflect on what has been achieved, but also to critically examine where progress has fallen short,” she writes.
The UNSC has a range of mechanisms and procedures for engaging with the PoC agenda along with enforcement tools to ensure compliance with international law, yet often lacks the political will to do so, states ADAMCZYK, a research fellow with the HPG.
PoC faces substantial challenges, related both to changes in the geopolitical context in which conflicts take place, and to more specific difficulties around definitional clarity, fragmentation of the PoC agenda and the lack of inclusive and sustained engagement, she writes.
To translate the normative progress made over the past 20 years into demonstrable improvements in civilian protection outcomes, the UNSC and the wider international community must advocate for stronger reporting on civilian harm, more robust accountability and enforcement, consistent and transparent use of vetoes within the UNSC and implementation of national level policy frameworks.
Regarding UN peacekeeping operations, the UNSC should provide greater support through increased clarity in mandates and expectations, matched by commensurate resources and funding.

The United Nations Must Restore the Founding Values and Spirit of the International Civil Service

As the world celebrates the centenary of the international civil service – established by the League of Nations – true commemoration starts with the realization that the power of principles is ultimately a greater guide of United Nations action than the principles of power.
“A return to principled action is necessary not only for the sake of the UN’s political relevance and moral authority but more urgently for the sake of the peoples of the world the UN is meant to protect from the vagaries of unprincipled power, MONA ALI KHALIL states.
“Restoring the relevance and credibility of the UN Secretariat therefore requires that UN leaders and staff have conviction in the efficacy of adhering to UN principles and values, as well as the courage to act on that conviction,” she writes in a paper titled ‘Restoring the Values and Spirit of the International Civil Service’, published by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
At a minimum, KHALIL stresses, the UN Secretariat must undertake three crucial actions going forward:
1. Return to a classical definition of impartiality. Impartiality has come to mean finding the midpoint between the parties to a conflict. As such, the UN has been reduced to pro forma statements condemning the violence and assigning equal responsibility on the parties to end the violence. “Such statements impose a false balance that often belies the scale and multiplicity of the violations of one party over another.”
The UN should not and must not be impartial to the UN Charter or to the rule of law; it must condemn violations of international human rights and humanitarian law objectively – regardless of the political or economic power of the perpetrator. It must condemn aggression, genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity as consistently and as unequivocally as it deplores acts of terrorism. It must name and shame State actors as loudly as it does non-State actors.
2. Uphold integrity as a higher calling. Integrity must be understood as something more than submitting financial disclosure forms and avoiding conflicts of interest. The UN Secretariat must not suffice with meeting minimum competencies but should rather aspire to the highest standards of competence. It must reimagine the international civil servant not as a matter of earning salaries and emoluments but rather as a calling to serve the objects and purposes of the United Nations.
No one should have any illusions about the difficulty of speaking truth to power, but there should be greater difficulty in counting the dead and injured when the UN Secretariat fails to do so out of political expediency. “The UN Secretariat must therefore be the first to demand criminal accountability for those who harm civilians – especially those it has itself deployed when they become the perpetrators of harm against those they are deployed to protect.”
3. Protect the independence of the UN Secretariat. The voices of those who speak truth to power or stand up to oppression – especially those entrusted with human rights or other rule of law mandates – should be protected by the organization and its Secretary-General – every day and in every way. “Too often, the record shows that such voices are muted or even mooted – by both external pressures and internal forces. They are branded as idealistic or worse yet as unrealistic – as if surrendering the Secretariat’s only power, its moral authority, is somehow more practical or pragmatic.”
The UN Secretary-General must also speak out loudly and stand up strongly; while he (and someday she) cannot force the Security Council to act, he can and should fully exercise his authority, under Article 99 of the UN Charter, to remind the Security Council of its duty to take prompt and effective action to resolve conflicts – not just to manage them. He must put forth clear and concrete recommendations to end impunity for violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
“In conclusion, the UN Secretariat must be more willing to get on the proverbial high horse especially when the grass is getting trampled by elephants,” KHALIL states. It should neither invite nor shy away from controversy. It must remain focused on the fulfilment of its mandates and driven by ‘respect for the law and respect for the truth’.
It should do so knowing in full confidence that if such values and attitudes were to drive any international civil servant ‘into positions of conflict with this or that interest’, as Dag Hammarskjöld wisely forewarned, then ‘that conflict is a sign of his neutrality and not of his failure to observe neutrality – then it is in line, not in conflict with, his duties as an international civil servant’.

After Annual Conference, UN and AU Move From Alignment to Impact

The United Nations Security Council: History, Current Composition, and Reform Proposals

Although membership of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has remained unreflective of today’s international realities, the body has reacted to the changing global order in ways previously unaccounted for, two leading experts contend in a new working paper.
The Council has increased the representation of emerging powers in informal ways. Potential candidates for permanent seats and their regional counterparts are committed as elected members, peacekeeping contributors or within the Peacebuilding Commission, MADELEINE O. HOSLI and THOMAS DÖRFLER write in ‘The United Nations Security Council: History, Current Composition, and Reform Proposals’ published by the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies.
“The Council, moreover, has reacted to global security challenges through working methods reform, expansion of sanctions regimes and involvement of non-state actors.”
The changing global order created new conditions for the Security Council to operate in, the authors stress. Simultaneously, the nature of conflicts has changed tremendously over time in terms of types of war and conflict, challenges such as terrorism and new forms of threats to societies. Increasingly, peace missions involve complex patterns of collaboration with regional organizations, aiming to create synergies and exploit benefits of joint operations.
Formal reform of the Council, in practice, is a difficult enterprise, HOSLI and DÖRFLER state. “ [A]ny proposal to change the composition of Security Council needs to strike careful and intertwined balances, such as ‘the balance between practicality and vision’, the balance ‘between power (or effectiveness) and legitimacy (or justice)’, and, perhaps most importantly, the ‘balance of interests’.”
When the United Nations was founded, the members of its Security Council and the permanent members in particular were to have the responsibility to secure and enforce peace. However, to fulfill this task, the member states represented in the UNSC also needed to have the resources to do so. Initially, this reasoning led to the creation of permanent seats for those UN member states that would be able to fulfill this task.
Clearly, in today’s world, the distribution of power and influence is quite different from what it was just after World War II. Accordingly, since the creation of the UN in 1945, there has been a debate about who should be represented as Council members. The discussion on possible reform of this institution became even more intensive after the end of the Cold War, when the Security Council had overcome superpower blockade, which created new possibilities for global action, the authors state.
Due to the diverse nature of UN membership, common notions of fairness or shared values and linked to this, the decision on who should ‘legitimately’ be represented in the Council, are hard to come by. In combination with the high institutional hurdle for change, adapting the composition of the Security Council therefore constitutes a considerable challenge and explains why there appears to be a seemingly endless debate on Security Council reform.
However, the debate about the (failure of) Security Council reform overshadows the gradual change in how the Council operates. “In fact, the Security Council of today is very different to the Security Council twenty-five years ago, even though its composition remains the same,” HOSLI and DÖRFLER state.
While formal representation is not inclusive and certainly biased, given today’s global power distribution and the dominance of the current permanent members, Council decision-making is increasingly embedded into new forms of informal governance in which experts and representatives of various nations not formally represented in the Council do have a ‘voice’.
“This system is far from ideal, but at least avoids some of the largest drawbacks of the lopsided ways in which the Security Council formally represents today’s structures of global governance.”
Further reforming the working methods of the Council, driven by its own members, and creating institutional novelties may be a promising avenue to find answers to current global governance challenges and to make its members more accountable, its decisions more transparent and its impact greater.

The United Nations and the Future of Warfare

China’s Counter-terrorism Strategy at the United Nations

Challenging the conventional depiction of the country as a revisionist power, China’s counter-terrorism strategy at the United Nations underscores Beijing’s efforts to project itself as a guardian of the existing international order, writes VIKASH CHANDRA.
“Generally speaking, over the past few decades, China has been regarded as a revisionist power, with an alternative vision of international order and an interest in significantly restructuring the prevailing order.”
This is especially considered to be the case in the political and human rights milieu, where China has proclaimed its adherence to the idea of ‘Asian values’ in the human rights domain, and its sociopolitical norms and values stand in opposition to the norms and values of the liberal international order, he writes in ‘Rising Powers and International Organizations: The Case of China’s Counter-terrorism Strategy at the United Nations’, published in China Report. Beijing’s initiative to establish the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank in recent years is also seen as a challenge to the US-led post-World War II international order.
“However, China’s counter-terrorism strategy at the UN tells a different story,” the author states. Through participation in the UN counter-terrorism mechanism, China has tried to project itself as a guardian, not a challenger, of the existing international order. Instead of behaving like a revisionist power, here, China, indeed, behaves like a status quo power. This is seen in the developments in China’s counter-terrorism strategy over the last 46 years.
Key changes in this strategy, like advocacy to bring the UN from the periphery to the center of international counter-terrorism, and assigning it a central coordinating and harmonization role in this endeavor, also reflect its intention to maintain rather than challenge the existing international order. China has emphasized adherence to the principles and purposes of the UN in international counter-terrorism. Earlier, China used to regard countering terrorism as the responsibility of the affected states and outside the purview of the United Nations.
In its intervention in the UN’s counter-terrorism activities, China’s main contribution lies in normative aspects, such as de-legitimization, advocacy and the non-use of force against another state, and in the identification of and response to the root causes of terrorism. It regards terrorism as a ‘common enemy’ of and the ‘gravest threat’ to humanity, and it advocates a universal zero-tolerance policy towards it.
Its position has shifted from identifying the root causes of terrorism in phenomena like colonialism, foreign occupation and racist regimes, to locating these in domestic factors such as lack of economic development and economic and social injustice. Foreign policy concerns, once a key driver of its policy towards terrorism, have become secondary to domestic concerns.
In order to project itself as a responsible actor, China has enacted anti-terrorism laws at home and sought to facilitate international cooperation through the signing of extradition treaties, information sharing and conducting joint anti-terrorism drills. It has also actively assisted terrorism-affected states to build their counter-terrorism capacity. China’s request to other countries to be part of the UN counter-terrorism mechanism, to implement the obligations and abide by the principles and purposes of the UN Charter, sends a clear signal about China’s status quoist intentions towards the UN, an essential part of the present liberal international order.
Despite these changes, CHANDRA contends, it must be recognized that ‘state-centrism’ remains at the core of China’s counter-terrorism approach. Although China puts the UN at the center of global counter-terrorism coordination efforts, it continues to regard states as the principal actors in international counter-terrorism. If an affected state is unable to fight terrorism effectively, only then does the international community have the responsibility to assist and build the capacity of the concerned state to tackle the menace.
China, thus, regards state sovereignty as sacrosanct in its counter-terrorism strategy at the United Nations. It advocates building consensus on this issue but is strongly opposed to the use of force against another state in the name of fighting. It holds that the counter-terror initiatives and measures of the UN must respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states and abide by the rules of international law.
Recent modifications in China’s foreign policy and practice, including a more muscular approach to countries in its neighborhood and beyond with whom it has disputes, have given rise to renewed discussion about China’s revisionist intentions towards the international order. Nevertheless, China’s voting record with respect to UN anti-terrorism resolutions as well as its other interventions at the UN on the front of counter-terrorism indicate that in this regard at least, China’s behavior by and large confirms its status quoist intentions.

Vikash Chandra, 'Rising Powers and International Organizations: The Case of China’s Counter-terrorism Strategy at the United Nations', China Report, Volume: 55 issue: 2, page(s): 125-144, May 1, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1177/0009445519834376

The UN and Prevention in the Era of AI

As AI convergence with dual-use technologies intrudes increasingly into the political, social, economic, and security spheres, creating new potential for systemic vulnerabilities and distributive inequalities, the multilateral system needs to be better understand and anticipate risks.
ELEONORE PAUWELS contributes to developing a common understanding of the emerging impacts of AI convergence on the United Nations’ prevention agenda. In ‘The New Geopolitics of Converging Risks: The UN and Prevention in the Era of AI’, published by the United Nations University Center for Policy Research, she provides: an analysis of current trends in AI convergence; scenarios that examine emerging opportunities and risks; principles to guide how innovation should be deployed responsibly by actors in the multilateral system; and a recommendation for a foresight capacity housed within the UN and shared across key communities.
“The combined convergence and decentralization of AI and other emerging technologies is not only disrupting war and conflicts, but politics, social cohesion and human well-being,” PAUWELS states. “With enough technical and political preparedness, AI convergence could be harnessed to prevent human trafficking, reduce civilian casualties, anticipate and mediate conflicts.”
With the collaboration of in-depth human and political expertise, algorithms will help combat hate speech and investigate forgeries, election fraud and violent crimes. Some of the most promising uses of AI and converging technologies will materialize to optimize human health, preventing famine and epidemics, with tools in precision biotech and agriculture. “If humans can learn how to anticipate and mitigate unintended consequences, future lives could be empowered on our burdened planet.”
Governance actors, including States and the private sector, will need to adopt techniques of inclusive foresight to be resilient and adaptive enough in the face of hybrid security threats and emerging risks.
A second implication is that States in the Global South will be the first vulnerable targets in this new geopolitical landscape of virtual conflicts and cyber colonization, the author states. Urgent support to develop foresight and responsible innovation is needed for those States that are struggling to compete, build and secure capacity in the development and deployment of AI and converging technologies. They risk becoming vulnerable links or ‘ungoverned cyberspaces’ and may turn more susceptible to dynamics of data-predation and value exfiltration. Such vulnerabilities may fuel and intensify a fierce competition for supremacy in technological convergence rather than foster digital cooperation.
Developing countries may lack the power, influence and foresight tools to shape responsible governance of converging technologies towards social benefits and away from political disruptions and weaponization. These fragile States could become a liability for a whole region.
Preventing such growing inequalities will rest on incentives coming from the multilateral system, PAUWELS writes. States interested in fostering responsible AI convergence could enter into mechanisms of digital cooperation with countries in the Global South to partner around mutually beneficial transfers of data, talent, technologies and security practices.
A third implication concerns the human side of global security risks, the author states. “Technological risks could have a powerful, long-term and corrosive impact on human security and wellbeing.” In contexts where uncertainty about future job security is rising, when facing complex technological and social transformations, larger subsets of the world population may face fears of becoming useless and irrelevant classes.
Global human psychological and emotional wellbeing could be receding. Underserved groups in societies may suffer from new forms of disempowerment. In turn, disempowerment and the lack of opportunity to participate in innovation will impact trust and social cohesion. Without proper citizen engagement and a means to contain the power of minority interests, technological development will proceed unhindered, for better or, quite possibly, worse. “The sheer speed of change will assuredly result not just in people who surrender their lives to intelligent and connected machines, but in societal disruptions that will be difficult to mitigate.”
PAUWELS states that it is time for governments to build a new social contract for the era of AI convergence. For instance, they could invest in measures that can reinforce networks of social cohesion and resilience. Such an effort would enhance the capacity of individuals, communities and systems to survive, learn, adapt and even transform in the face of political and socio-economic shocks and stresses.
“In the end, the most important message from this report is the need to harness the full force of the UN Charter and the multilateral system to shape technological progress according to a diversity of values and life experiences.”
The author proposes a path for the UN to build, guide and lead a Global Foresight Observatory for AI Convergence. The Observatory would be a constellation of key public and private sector stakeholders convened by a strategic foresight team within the UN to implement a shared foresight methodology. The Observatory would equip the UN to articulate tailored and robust scenarios from which innovative strategies can emerge; map and involve key stakeholders that reflect the unique ways in which technologies are converging; and develop coherent and responsible approaches to leverage innovation and technology for prevention.